The Washington area’s biotech industry is bracing for another hit as federal funding for the National Institutes of Health, one of the region’s largest providers of research and development money, remains flat for another year.
President George Bush’s proposed 2008 budget allocates $28.7 billion, a less than 1 percent increase from 2007 budget levels. For several years, scientists have been raising the red flag, saying that a slow down in NIH funding will hurt progress across a wide range of research and development projects.
In the Washington region, where the biotech industry is still finding its footing, a slowdown in funding could hurt the local economy, said Sally Sternbach, director of Rockville Economic Development Inc. Maryland’s I-270 corridor, and Rockville in particular, is heavily dependent on NIH funding to jump-start economic activity. For example, many of the area’s biotech startup firms were founded by researchers who were awarded NIH grant money.
The slowdown in funding “has a profound effect. … It has a big impact because most of the NIH labs are here in Maryland,” Sternbach said. “There are winners and losers in that environment,and that means there are diseases that are winners and losers and that’s tough.”
In 2000, NIH pumped $950 million into the Washington region’s biotech industry. But that number hasn’t increased by much over the years and competition for those funds has become increasingly heated.
“For individual scientists, their chances of success of winning a grant have dropped from one in three to one in less than five,” said Kei Koizumi, director of the research and development budget and policy program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Obviously there’s a lot more stress and anxiety around the scientific community.”
However, the NIH’s budget doubled between 1998 and 2003 and proponents of the slowdown say the budget has simply leveled off to catch up with that rapid increase.
Either way, “it means much tougher competition to win NIH research grants,” Koizumi said. “NIH is so big. It really dominates the biomedical research field. It is hard to replace.”
